Category Archives: Neil Armstrong

08/26/2012
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Andrea Seabrook, Apollo 11, Bob Garfield, Buzz Aldrin, DecodeDC, Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong, NPR, On the Media, Science, US Congress

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)

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STEEL WILL

Forget Columbus. Forget all the rest of the pirates and rapists and genocide artists and pathological acquisitors we were force-fed as heroes in elementary school.

Neil Armstrong and his mates, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, rode in a shiny white tin can a quarter million miles away from Earth to a place where there was no air, no water, no natives to beg for help from (then kill) — I mean, honestly, can you imagine any more audacious, courageous thing to do?

Aldrin, Collins & Armstrong

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Farewell, explorer.

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THE CAPITOL OF LIES

Make sure to catch this weekend’s edition of “On the Media.” Host Bob Garfield interviews former NPR Congressional Correspondent Andrea Seabrook, who quit her job, basically because she was sick of the bullshit spewing from the mouths of politicians these days.

Andrea Seabrook

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Which is admirable — to an extent.

Seabrook tells Garfield she’s running from lies. “The lies that I’m talking about are just the complete and total disingenuousness of almost everything that’s said all day long in the US Capitol.”

She gives examples of how pols from both parties break the 8th Commandment as a matter of course.

The obvious question is, why do Seabrook and her colleagues let the bums get away with it? She acknowledges their complicity in the great lies. Journalists, she says, collude with pols “by covering what politicians say all day every day, rather than what they don’t say. As journalists, walking into a situation where we know it’s political theater and then recording those words and playing them back to the American people as if they were news plays into the game that they’re playing.”

House Of Lies

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Still, she doesn’t say why she continued to play the game even after recognizing that she’d been drawn in. Why, for instance, did Seabrook never say to a pol who was lying, bald-faced, to her, “That’s not true! Why do you say such things?”

Seabrook is starting a new website called DecodeDC which, she promises, will dig beneath the lies.

The problem is only political geeks and policy wonks will go to her site. The vast majority of the citizenry will be stuck with commercial media reporters who not only play the game, but love it.

Maybe Seabrook is heroic for chucking it all. Maybe it would have been more heroic had she stuck it out with NPR and rebelled from within.

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THIS. IS. SCARY.

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Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.

❏ I Love Charts — Life as seen through charts.

❏ XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

❏ Skepchick — Women scientists look at the world and the universe.

Skepchick: Click For Full Article

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❏ Indexed — All the answers in graph form, on index cards.

❏ I Fucking Love Science — A Facebook community of science geeks.

❏ Present/&/Correct — Fun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

❏ Flip Flop Fly Ball — Baseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

❏ Mental Floss — Facts.

Click For Full Article

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❏ Sodaplay — Create your own models or play with other people’s models.

❏ Eat Sleep Draw — An endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

❏ Big Think — Tapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

❏ The Daily Puppy — So shoot me.

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

◗ IU Bill Armstrong Stadium — Hoosier women’s soccer vs. Missouri State; noon

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Alice”; 3pm

◗ First United Methodist Church — Voices United: Benefit for Interfaith Winter Shelter, featuring Heidi Grant Murphy, Kevin Murphy, Grey Larsen & Cindy Kallet, Rachel Caswell, Tom Walsh, Jeremy Allen, Steve Zegree; 4pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — Music: Andra Faye & the Rays; 6pm

◗ Bryan Park — Sunday Outdoor Concert series: Creek Dogs; 6:30pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Surviving Life”; 6:30pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Ryder Film Series: “Take This Waltz”; 7pm

ONGOING

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Exhibits:

  • “40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s”; through September 1st

◗ IU Art Museum — Exhibits:

  • “A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th

  • Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th

  • Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th

  • “Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th

  • David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st

  • Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012

  • Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st

  • “French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald Gallery — Exhibits:

  • “Media Life,” drawings and animation by Miek von Dongen; through September 15th

  • “Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture”; through September 15th

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — “Ephemeral Ink: Selections of Tattoo Art from the Kinsey Institute Collection”; through September 21st

◗ IU Lilly Library — Exhibit, “Translating the Canon: Building Special Collections in the 21st Century”; through September 1st

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Reopens Tuesday, August 21st

◗ Monroe County History Center — Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

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07/20/2012
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Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin, Chappaquiddick, Chicago Cubs, Denialism, Denver Theater Shooting, Drought, Elmo Taylor, Fairness Doctrine, Global Warming, Global Weirding, God Guns & Gays, Guns, James Inhofe, Joy Shayne Laughter, Manson Family, Martin Amis, McCormick's Creek State Park, Mike Pence, Muddy Boots Cafe, Neil Armstrong, Soma Coffee, Ted Kennedy, The Greatest Hoax, Tribune Tower, Tulsa World, Tyler Ferguson, Woodstock

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.” — Martin Amis

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AMERICA, I TOLD YOU BUT YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN

Two things about the mass shooting outside Denver early this morning:

  1. I demand that reporters and announcers cease and desist obsessively referring to the opening of the new Batman movie. It’s as though they’re already writing the dramatic narrative for the shooting: To wit, it’s a movie dealing with darkness and evil and, poetically, a dark and evil event followed. No. It was an atrocity and it doesn’t need poetic spin
  2. I’ve said this too many times already: America, stick your guns up your ass.

It Happened At The Movies

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DON’T CONFUSE ME WITH THE FACTS

So, farmers in Indiana and much of the rest of the Midwest will lose their crops this summer, thanks to the drought and the unusually high temperatures.

Experts say drought conditions are exacerbated by higher temps which cause faster evaporation.

Experts also say human activity is causing global warming and global weirding.

Goddammit, how many times do the sane among us have to say this?

We sell Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe‘s book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” at the Book Corner. For the longest time it was on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list (which is ironic considering the book’s premise).

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Inhofe has been verbally vomiting on this topic for more than a decade now.

Back in 2006 in an interview in the Tulsa World newspaper, Inhofe had this to say about global warming:

“It kind of reminds… I could use the Third Reich, the big lie. You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that’s their strategy.”

Whoever “they” are is never revealed. Make no mistake, though, it’s a conspiracy. Neither does Inhofe explain why any group of misguided souls might want to conjure up such a hoax.

The Environmental Protection Agency, according to Inhofe, is just another Gestapo. He often cites biblical passages to back up his “arguments” against global warming

Inhofe’s stance on the “hoax” has changed only slightly over the years. What he now characterizes as the greatest hoax he only ranked number two in his early years in the Senate. The biggest hoax at that time, he felt, was the idea that the framers of the US Constitution were in favor of a separation of church and state

Inhofe’s slogan when he first ran for the Senate in 1994 was “God, guns, and gays” — as in, they were the three most important topics on which he’d concentrate.

From God’s Lips To The Senator’s Ear

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In short, the man is a dick.

Want more evidence? Try this, something he spewed during a debate on gay marriage:

“I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”

Anyway, there isn’t much the average citizen who can read and write can do about tailless monkeys like Inhofe. But I’ve found one thing: I always make sure his book is hidden behind a bunch of other books.

Every little bit helps.

Oh, another thing we can do is vote. For instance, Indiana gubernatorial candidate Mike Pence often appeared with Inhofe on right wing radio and TV shows. The two also worked on joint legislation including quashing the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting.

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TRANQUILITY BASE

The majority of human beings on this planet were not alive when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gamboled on the moon back in the summer of 1969.

The Lunar Excursion Module “Eagle” landed on the surface of the moon 43 years ago today, at 2:18pm our time. Some six and a half hours later, first Armstrong, then Aldrin bounded down the LEM’s ladder to leave their footprints on extraterrestrial dirt.

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I was 13 at the time. I was also transfixed. Swear to god, I stared at the moon that Sunday evening, hoping against hope that I could see something like the LEM’s rocket engine firing.

That first moon landing remains one of the defining moments of my life. It happened during the summer of Woodstock, Kennedy at Chappaquiddick, the Manson Family, and the Cubs surely on their way to their first World Series appearance in my short lifetime. I considered all of them part of a package. Peace, love, politics, music, hippies, horror, unbridled joy, crazy hope, and crushing disappointment.

Unbridled Joy

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I once assumed that everyone — even those born after ’69 — considered the moon landing something, well transcendent.

Many don’t.

I was walking down Michigan Avenue with my brothers and his three sons one Sunday afternoon ten or so years ago. We approached the Tribune Tower which is famous for having bricks, stones and other chunks of famous buildings embedded in its walls. There are pieces of the Alamo, the Berlin Wall, Westminster Palace, the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Parthenon and many, many others.

There also is a moon rock on display. It’s not embedded in the wall, of course, considering it may be the most expensive hunk of stone in existence. It’s behind a several-inch thick slab of bullet-proof glass next to the main entrance of the Tower.

I’d passed it dozens or even hundreds of times in my life and never had neglected to stop and look at it. There is a hunk of the moon, I’d think as I gawked. Holy fk!

Moonrock Encased In Lucite At The Tribune Tower

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So, as the five of us came off the Michigan Avenue bridge I said to the boys, “I wanna show you something so cool you won’t believe it.” Ranging in age from their early to late teens, they seemed skeptical. Only the appearance, say, of Batman himself or the spectacle of a man leaping from the top of the Tower to his certain death was likely to impress them.

Still, I believed this piece of a celestial body 238,000 distant would give them goosebumps.

It didn’t. I may as well have pointed out a common house brick. The only one of my nephews who was moved to even comment on the rock said, “So what?”

I was crushed.

BTW: Author Joy Shayne Laughter quoted this morning from some anonymous philosopher (neither of us could remember who said it), “We went to the moon on 126K of RAM. Now, it takes six megabytes to open a Word doc.”

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ELMO TAYLOR

Pay no attention to the Muddy Boots Cafe calendar listing that has the band Elmo Taylor playing there Sunday night.

I was all set to plug the appearance here when Tyler Ferguson, rhythm guitarist for the band, came into Soma Coffee and plopped down next to me.

“So,” I said, “Sunday night at Muddy Boots, eh?”

Elmo Taylor

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“What the hell are you talking about?” she snapped. Today seems to be a chocolate day for the usually ebullient Ferg.

It turns out Elmo is not playing at Muddy Boots this weekend. ET junkies take heart: the band is playing at McCormick’s Creek State Park amphitheater at 7:30, Saturday night.

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Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

◗ Ivy Tech, Bloomington Campus — Breakfast Learning Seriea: Depression, Suicide, and Our Aging Population”; 8am

◗ IU Dowling Center — English Conversation Club, for non-native speakers of American English; 1pm

◗ The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts — Opening reception, “Abstracts on Canvas,” by Rick McCoy; 6pm

◗ IU Art Museum — Jazz in July, Monika Herzig Acoustic Project; 6:30pm

Monika Herzig

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◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Oslo, August 31”; 7pm

◗ Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Indiana Boys; 7-9pm

◗ Bloomington Speedway — Indiana Sprint Week; racing begins at 7:30pm

◗ Oliver Winery — Live music, Mike Milligan & Steam Shovel; 7:30pm

◗ IU Wells-Metz Theatre — Musical, “You Can’t Take It with You”; 7:30pm

◗ Buskirk-Chumley Theater — Mary Chapin Carpenter; 8pm

◗ IU Musical Arts Center — Summer Arts Festival: Symphonic series, works by Strauss, Mahler & Schubert, conducted by Cliff Colnot; 8pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — LottaBLUESah; 8pm

◗ IU Woodburn Hall Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Elles”; 8pm

Juliette Binoche in “Elles”

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◗ The Comedy Attic — Hannibal Buress; 8 & 10:30pm

◗ Cafe Django — Mr. Taylor & His Dirty Dixie Band; 8:15pm

◗ IU Fine Arts Theater — Ryder Film Series: “Gerhard Richter Painting”; 8:45pm

◗ The Bluebird — Todd Snider; 9pm

◗ Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Cade Puckett; 9:30-11:30pm

Ongoing:

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Exhibits:

  • John D. Shearer, “I’m Too Young For This  @#!%”; through July 30th
  • Claire Swallow, ‘Memoir”; through July 28th
  • Dale Gardner, “Time Machine”; through July 28th
  • Sarah Wain, “That Takes the Cake”; through July 28th
  • Jessica Lucas & Alex Straiker, “Life Under the Lens — The Art of Microscopy”; through July 28th

◗ IU Art Museum — Exhibits:

  • Qiao Xiaoguang, “Urban Landscape: A Selection of Papercuts” ; through August 12th
  • “A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th
  • Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th
  • Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th
  • “Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th
  • David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st
  • Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012
  • Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st
  • “French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald Gallery — Exhibits:

  • Kinsey Institute Juried Art Show; through July 21st
  • Bloomington Photography Club Annual Exhibition; July 27th through August 3rd

◗ IU Kinsey Institute Gallery — “Ephemeral Ink: Selections of Tattoo Art from the Kinsey Institute Collection”; through September 21st

◗ IU Lilly Library — Exhibit, “Translating the Canon: Building Special Collections in the 21st Century”; through September 1st

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — Closed for semester break

◗ Monroe County History Center — Exhibits:

  • “What Is Your Quilting Story?”; through July 31st
  • Photo exhibit, “Bloomington: Then and Now” by Bloomington Fading; through October 27th

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01/31/2012
1 Comment
Albert Einstein, Ambient Music, Apollo 11, Bram Tchaikovsky, Brian Eno, Buzz Aldrin, Camilla Williams, Charles Beavers, Edward J. Goodwin, Indiana State Legislature, Indiana University, Intelligent Design, Jacobs School of Music, Kansas (band), Koyaanisqatsi, Malcolm X, Mental Floss, Minimalism, Neil Armstrong, New York City Opera, Philip Glass, Prog Rock, Trance Music, Value of Pi

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity — and I’m not sure about the former.” — Albert Einstein

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A HEAVENLY PIONEER

Bloomington’s own Camilla Williams, international opera star and professor emeritus at IU, died Sunday. She was 92.

Williams

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Williams was thought to be the first black woman to appear with a major US opera company, the New York City Opera in 1946. Her late husband, Charles Beavers, was an attorney for Malcolm X.

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MASTER OF MINIMALISM

Philip Glass is 75 today. He is also still very, very cool.

Glass

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Do yourself a favor and download the documentary, “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.” It is a gloriously beautiful and ugly examination of life on late 20th Century Earth. It has no narrator; no human’s voice is heard throughout. The only sound you’ll hear is Glass’s musical score.

Glass presaged trance music by decades. And the composer certainly influenced Brian Eno, whose ambient forms beginning in the mid-1970s helped save the world from the navel-gazing pap of the likes of Kansas and other uber-pretentious prog rockers.

Eno

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Glass may well be the composer music students in the year 2512 revere as they do Bach or Wagner today.

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INDIANA: THE SQUARED STATE

Now that the great state o’Indiana is considering teaching the myth of Intelligent Design in our public schools, it’s worth keeping in mind that our fair fiftieth of this holy land once before attempted to throw a caveman’s club into the gears of intellectual progress.

Mental Floss points out that in the 1890s, an Indiana chucklehead by the name of Edward J. Goodwin fantasized that he’d discovered a method to “square the circle,” a long disproved mathematical exercise. Goodwin was convinced that by equating the circle with a square, one could easily find its area.

Part of Goodwin’s fever dream was to jigger with the value of pi, the constant that allows the sane among us to calculate a circle’s area. It was the equivalent of NASA navigators saying, “Aw, what the hell, let’s just call the distance to the moon 240,000 miles — what’s a couple thousand miles one way or another?”

Given that attitude, the mummified corpses of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might today be floating several billion miles outside our Solar System.

Just Point That Thing Toward The Moon, Boys

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Goodwin — from the town of Solitude, appropriately enough — told the world in the 1890s that he’d found the secret to squaring the circle. In the grand tradition of many another snake oil salesman, Goodwin was more than willing to let mathematicians and educators use his secret formula — for a price.

But he had a soft spot for Indiana and offered to let Hoosier State schools teach his method for free as long as the state legislature would enact a statute declaring his crackpot idea the real thing.

And guess what — several Indiana House committees studied his equations, including his insistence that pi should be 3.2 (as opposed to the accurate constant 3.141592653589793….) The committees approved Goodwin’s methods and wrote up a bill declaring pi to be 3.2 and the circle, legally, squared.

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And then the full House approved the bill unanimously! By the time the nation’s newspapers got hold of this news and began to bray with laughter at Indiana, the state Senate defeated the bill. Even that vote was iffy after a Senate committee passed it onto the floor.

Science and Indiana — I wonder if this is the first time the two words have ever appeared together in print.

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GIRL OF MY DREAMS

Another chestnut from my college radio years, by Bram Tchiakovsky.

Pure power pop poetry:

Judy was an American girl/

She came in the morning/

With the US Mail.

Enjoy the soaring melody, goosebump harmony, and bell-ringing rhythm chord progressions.

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11/27/2011
1 Comment
Alex Straiker, Apollo/Soyuz, Buzz Aldrin, Indiana University, John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, Kennedy Space Center, Marijuana, Mars Curiosity Science Laboratory, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Soma Coffee

The Pencil Today:

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GETTIN’ HIGH IN THE FRIENDLY SKY

The first hero I ever had was John Glenn. He was the first American to orbit the Earth in a space capsule, Friendship 7.

John Glenn, Weightless In Orbit

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Glenn was a member of the coolest gang on the planet, the original Project Mercury astronauts. Let’s see, off the top of my head there were Glenn, Wally Schirra, Scott Carpenter, Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, Gordon Cooper, um, uh….

Okay, help me Wikipedia. Oh yeah, I forgot Deke Slayton. Poor guy — was diagnosed with a heart murmur and was grounded before he could go up in a Mercury capsule. Fortunately, he was given clearance to ride on the Apollo/Soyuz mission in 1975.

So, I got six of the seven. Pretty good for 50 years later.

Swear to god, I spent the years from September 12, 1962, when President Kennedy committed America to landing humans (oh, okay, men) on the moon by the end of the decade, to July 20, 1969 in a state of eager impatience.

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The only things I looked forward to as much were getting my first drivers license and, aw gee, having my first sexual experience.

Turns out the drivers license thing was an anticlimax. The sex thing, you’ll pardon the pun, was not.

But neither experience could match the night that Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hopped out of the LEM onto the lunar surface. Honest. I remember that night — I do not remember my first sexual experience. Okay, call me a geek.

Buzz Aldrin On The Moon (Neil Armstrong In The Reflection)

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I remember just staring at the moon that Sunday night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see anything out of the ordinary but, still, I stared.

Yes, I was a space geek. Always have been. In fact, The Loved One and I visited Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago. I kid you not, I spent a full 20 minutes just gawking — with my mouth open — at the Saturn rocket hanging from the ceiling of the museum.

Saturday morning when The Loved One and I walked into Soma Coffee, our pal Alex Straiker, the mad scientist of the brain, was glued to his laptop screen, watching NASA’s live stream of of the Mars Curiosity Science Laboratory liftoff.

“Only 22 minutes to go,” Straiker said, appearing about as boyish as a graying, middle-aged man can.

“Aw, cool!” I said, just as boyish.

Nice to know there are at least three of us left in this world.

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FROM OUTER SPACE TO INNER CRANIUM

Speaking of Alex Straiker, check out his microscopy images on our Gallery & Studio page.

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